Major League Baseball's 91-year-old exemption from antitrust laws has been eroded by Congress and the courts and should not be used to block the Oakland A's move to San Jose, lawyers for the South Bay city said Friday in final written arguments to a federal judge.

San Jose sued the major leagues in June to challenge rules that allow the San Francisco Giants to veto any relocation of another team to a site in their territory, which includes Santa Clara County. In reply, MLB lawyers argued last month that the suit must be dismissed because of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, dating back to 1922, that said the antimonopoly protections of federal antitrust laws do not apply to professional baseball.

The city's filing Friday described baseball's antitrust exemption as "antiquated and oft-criticized" but did not say it should be overturned, something that only the Supreme Court or Congress could do.

Instead, San Jose argued that the exemption has been narrowed in recent decades and no longer applies to the relocation of teams. The movement of teams from one city to another, the city contended, is governed by the laws that regulate all other businesses. Those laws prohibit unreasonable restrictions on competition.

Stifling competition

"Major League Baseball as a sport emphasizes competition. Yet Major League Baseball as a business refuses to believe it is subject to the same antitrust rules that apply to all other sports," Joseph Cotchett, a lawyer representing San Jose, said in the court filing.

Under those rules, he said, the city is entitled to a court order forbidding the Giants from blocking the move to San Jose, and triple damages for its economic losses.

Should San Jose's argument succeed, it would reduce the major leagues' long-standing power over their terrain and might also enable more teams to move for financial reasons.

U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte of San Jose has scheduled a hearing Oct. 4 on baseball's request to dismiss the suit.

The A's and Giants both declined to comment. Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter said baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has asked both teams not to speak publicly about territorial rights.

A's owners Lew Wolff and John Fisher have been trying for years to move the team out of its Oakland stadium, now called the O.co Coliseum, which they say is outdated and a financial hindrance. The A's and San Jose have proposed building a ballpark near the Diridon train station downtown.

The main obstacle is the Giants' exclusive right to the territory under rules that are grounded in baseball's exemption - unique among professional sports - from antitrust laws.

The Supreme Court granted that exclusion in a unanimous 1922 ruling that said the major leagues were not engaged in interstate commerce because their games did not cross state lines. The court now takes a much broader view of interstate commerce but has repeatedly reaffirmed the antitrust exemption, describing it in 1972 as "an aberration that has been with us now for half a century."

"The Supreme Court has never indicated any intention to limit or abolish baseball's antitrust exemption," John Keker, the major leagues' attorney in the case, said in last month's filing seeking dismissal of the San Jose suit.

In addition, he argued, "league structure, operating territories and team relocation are at the absolute core" of that exemption - a position that San Jose disputed on Friday.

Exemption narrowed

Cotchett, the city's lawyer, cited a 1993 ruling by a federal judge that analyzed the Supreme Court's 1972 decision and concluded that it had narrowed the antitrust exemption so that it applied only to labor and player-team disputes and not to relocations. That ruling briefly revived a lawsuit challenging baseball's refusal to let the Giants negotiate a sale to prospective owners in Tampa Bay.

That case is "strikingly similar" to the San Jose suit, Cotchett said, and the Florida Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in a 1994 ruling. He said Congress further narrowed the antitrust exemption in 1998 when it passed a law subjecting player-team disputes to antimonopoly rules.

The baseball exemption "is judicially created and thus should be narrowly construed," Cotchett said.

Baseball's exemption

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed baseball's immunity from antimonopoly laws at least three times, most recently in 1972.

1922: Federal Base Ball Club of Baltimore vs. National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs.

In a lawsuit, the Baltimore franchise of the old Federal League, by then defunct, claimed that the 16 teams in the National League and American League violated antitrust laws by purchasing or otherwise inducing Federal League teams to leave the league. The court ruled unanimously that baseball wasn't covered by federal antitrust law.

George Earl Toolson had been for many years a pitcher for the Newark Bears, a minor-league team for the New York Yankees. He believed he was good enough to play in the majors, but the Yankees refused to promote him. He challenged the reserve clause, which allowed teams to maintain rights to a player even after his contract expired. The clause effectively prevented competition among teams to acquire players and, in turn, kept salaries artificially deflated.

The decision cited the 1922 ruling and read, in part, that "Congress had no intention of including the business of baseball within the scope of the federal antitrust laws," and "baseball is a sport, not a business." The ruling reaffirmed the 1922 ruling by a 7-2 majority.

1972: Flood vs. Kuhn.

Curt Flood, a professional player traded to another club without his previous knowledge or consent, brought this antitrust suit after being refused the right to make his own contract with another major league team, which is not permitted under the reserve clause.

The court upheld the antitrust exemption by a 5-3 margin.

Recent threats to the exemption

August 1992: The exemption faced new scrutiny as a result of the proposed move by the Giants to St. Petersburg, Fla.

December 1992: Vincent Piazza and his business partner, Vincent Tirendi, filed suit in federal court seeking to overturn the exemption and force the sale of the Giants to investors based in St. Petersburg.

October 1993: A bill to strip Major League Baseball of its trust-exempt status stalled before the Senate Judiciary Committee after a huge lobbying effort by team owners.

October 1994: Congress dropped its effort to partially repeal baseball's antitrust exemption after Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, withdrew his legislation because he didn't have enough votes.

October 1998: President Clinton signed the Curt Flood Act, overriding part of the 1922 Supreme Court ruling. The legislation revoked the antitrust exemption only for labor relations, not for matters involving relocation, league expansion or the minor leagues.

June 2013: The city of San Jose sued Major League Baseball in an effort to move the A's to the South Bay, a lawsuit that challenges the Giants' claim to the region and MLB's monopoly over the business of professional baseball.